NEW YORK (AP) — A trade group for natural gas utilities spent $200,000 lobbying Congress in the third quarter on regulation of drilling, support for low income families and promotion of natural gas vehicles, according to a recent disclosure report.

That's 23 percent less than the $260,000 the American Gas Association spent in the third quarter of last year. It's 12 percent more than the $178,000 the group spent in the second quarter of 2011.

AGA, based in Washington, represents utilities and other companies that deliver and sell natural gas to residential, commercial and industrial customers.

It
said it opposed legislation to "restrict or discourage natural gas
production," citing proposals in the House and Senate to regulate the
gas-drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing or fracking. The
technique has boosted production, pushed gas prices down, and encouraged more use of the fuel, but environmentalists say it could contaminate ground water.

The
association lobbied Congress to increase heating assistance funds for
low income families. Most households in the U.S. use natural gas for
heating.
AGA also lobbied Congress to keep taxes on dividends from
rising and in favor of subsidies to increase sales of vehicles powered
by natural gas.
The group disclosed its spending for the
July-to-September period in a report filed with the House clerk's office
Oct. 20. Lobbyists are required to disclose activities that could
influence members of the executive and legislative branches of
government under a federal law enacted in 1995.

Smartphone apps, desktop apps, and web apps are some of the best tools
we have to get things done, express ourselves, and yes, sometimes have
fun. You may have once thought programming was the domain of anti-social
neck beards living in basements across the world, but the fact is,
anyone can code, and almost everyone can benefit from knowing a little
bit about programming. This week's episode of Lifehacker is an
introduction into the basics of coding.
This is the sixteenth episode of season two of Lifehacker. Today's episode highlights:

How to pick a programming language. We discuss our first programming
projects, and how they helped motivate us and choose the right language
for our needs.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Mitt Romney is dismissing his offer to make a $10,000 bet with Rick Perry
as merely "an outrageous number to answer an outrageous charge" —
namely, Perry's claim that Romney made changes to parts of his book.

Romney
said Monday he made the offer in the weekend GOP presidential debate
because Perry erroneously claimed that he deleted parts of his book, "No
Apology" that referred to Romney's support for a health care mandate.

Romney told Fox News his bet offer was meaningless hyperbole, akin to saying "I'll bet you a million bucks."

The bet sparked charges that Romney, a wealthy businessman, is out of step with economic challenges facing ordinary Americans.

Romney said what the American people are tired of is President Barack Obama deflecting blame for his failed economic policies.

Obama's 2012 Strategy

By Peter Beinart | The Daily Beast – 3 hrs ago

Related Content

Obama's 2012 Strategy

There are two ways a president can run for reelection. The first is to boast about your success in your first term, and promise to build on it in the next. That’s what Dwight Eisenhower did in 1956; it’s what Ronald Reagan did in 1984; it’s what Bill Clinton
did in 1996. For the strategy to work, Americans have to be relatively
satisfied with their lot, and relatively optimistic about the future.

For Barack Obama
today, with unemployment over 8 percent and three-quarters of Americans
convinced that the country is going in the wrong direction, that’s not
an option. So he’s relying on strategy number two: telling Americans
that their unhappiness is not his fault. It’s the fault of his political
opponents, opponents whose victory would doom any hopes for better days
to come.

Obama began laying out that argument last week in Kansas, and continued it Sunday on 60 Minutes. The story goes like this: Once upon a time, in the middle of the 20th century, the American economy
was strong, and it benefited all Americans, up and down the class
ladder. Then, at some point—perhaps in the 1970s or 1980s, perhaps
during the George W. Bush
years—things began to go wrong. “Long before the recession hit,” Obama
declared in Kansas, “hard work stopped paying off for too many people.
Fewer and fewer of the folks who contributed to the success of our economy actually benefited from that success.”

Then,
the story continues, all hell broke loose: “For many years, credit
cards and home equity loans papered over this harsh reality. But in
2008, the house of cards collapsed.” As president, Obama tried to remedy
the situation, but was stymied by the very people who had created the
disaster in the first place. As he told 60 Minutes, “I think the
Republicans [in Congress] made a different calculation, which was, ‘You
know what? We really screwed up the economy. Obama seems popular. Our
best bet is to stand on the sidelines, because we think the economy’s
gonna get worse, and at some point, just blame him.’” In other words,
the same Republicans who destroyed the broad-based prosperity of the
post-war years, and laid the foundations for the financial crisis, have
refused to help fix either problem. And now they want the White House so
they can ensure that the problems they created never, ever, get solved.
From
Obama’s perspective, this narrative has its advantages. In the face of
Republican claims that his policies have failed to revive the economy,
Obama is turning the blame on the Republicans
themselves. Instead of arguing that his policies have succeeded in
keeping the recession from being worse—an argument that could easily
sound defeatist—Obama is implicitly conceding that his economic recovery
strategy has failed, but laying the responsibility at the feet of the
party trying to unseat him. His narrative also lets him insist that the
Republican nominee is not a fresh face with fresh ideas, but rather a
reincarnation of the people who destroyed the economy in the first
place.
The fuzziness comes when Obama tries to explain how exactly
the Republicans created this mess. In Kansas, he took aim at “you’re on
your own” economics, which, as he noted, has been a critique
progressives have been leveling since Theodore Roosevelt’s day. But
while that may be a plausible summary of the policies that have been
hurting middle-class Americans for decades now, it doesn’t really
capture the policies that contributed to the financial crisis. The
financial crisis wasn’t primarily about rampant individualism. If it had
been, the Wall Street
bankers who gambled away billions would have, as individuals, paid the
price. Instead, after profiting individually when the market went up,
they forced the rest of the country to save them when the market went
down. The financial crisis was an example of what happens when the
richest Americans are allowed to practice “you’re on your own” economics
when it suits them but demand that everyone else bail them out when it
doesn’t.

Successful
presidential candidates do more than simply tell a story. They tell a
story that captures the conditions and mood of the country at a
particular moment in time. Obama doesn’t need to fully embrace Occupy Wall Street,
but he needs to understand why the movement has caught on: Because many
Americans believe Wall Street plays a central role in the warping of
our economic and political system. A generic attack on Republican
individualism isn’t good enough. Most Americans still don’t know why Barack Obama
believes the roof fell in on America in 2008, and why he’s still more
capable of repairing the damage in a second term than his political
adversaries. Unless he answers those questions better over the next 11
months, he won’t get the chance.

Russian billionaire
Mikhail Prokhorov has said he will challenge Prime Minister Vladimir
Putin in next March's presidential election.

Mr Prokhorov said the decision was "the most serious decision" of his life.
Saturday saw Russia's biggest demonstration in many years by protesters calling for fresh parliamentary polls over vote fraud.
Mr Putin's party United Russia barely scraped a majority in the elections held earlier this month.
"I have made the most serious decision of my life. I am running for president," Mr Prokhorov said at a news conference.
Earlier this year, the metals billionaire and owner of the US
NBA New Jersey Nets basketball team made a short-lived effort to
challenge the United Russia party in this month's parliamentary
elections.
He later resigned from his own party following an internal power struggle that he blamed on the Kremlin.
Mr Prokhorov is ranked by Forbes as Russia's third richest man with a fortune of around $18bn (£11bn; $13bn euros).

NEWPORT BEACH, Calif., March 21, 2011 — TiaLinx, Inc., a developer of
remotely controlled mini-unmanned aerial and ground vehicles integrated
with mm-wave miniaturized radars, today announced the launch of the
Phoenix40-A. The mini-UAV system is capable of performing dual functions
as a motion detector as well as probing for breathing of a hiding
person in a compound. The mini-UAV can be remotely controlled at long
standoff distances from ground or an airborne asset.
The lightweight and agile mini-UAV with programmability to fly to or
land at multiple waypoints has been integrated with TiaLinx’s fine beam
ultra-wideband (UWB), multi-Gigahertz radio frequency (RF) sensor array.
The system provides long standoff surveillance of a premise to track
movement as well as to detect motionless live objects. TiaLinx’s
real-time UWB RF Imaging development was sponsored by a SBIR Phase II
from the Army’s PEO AMMO, PM-CCS.
Through a software-controlled interface which is integrated into a
laptop or joystick controller unit, Phoenix40-A can be remotely guided
from long distances to perform mission critical tasks. In addition to
the programmed GPS guided multi-waypoint visits, the integrated video
cameras allow for day and night landing and monitoring of a premise
under surveillance for enhanced situational awareness. Capability to
probe a compound at standoff keeps the operator and the Phoenix40-A out
of harm’s way.
The RF Scanner is mounted on a lightweight mini-UAV and transmits
wideband signals that are highly directional and can penetrate
reinforced concrete wall at an extended range. In the receiver, a signal
detector circuit is employed to capture the reflections from targets.
Amplitude and delay information are then processed in an integrated
signal processor.
“Phoenix40-A’s introduction is intended to provide another
breakthrough in miniaturization of advanced life detection sensors that
provide the capability to sense-through-the-wall (STTW) remotely. Like
its sister product Cougar20-H that was launched last month, Phoenix40-A
can also be remotely programmed to survey a compound at multiple way
points. It can scan a multi-story building and provide its layout. It is
also capable of scanning in-road and off-road horizontally to detect
buried unexploded ordnance (UXO),” commented Dr. Fred Mohamadi, Founder
and CEO of TiaLinx. “TiaLinx is constantly miniaturizing and upscaling
its UWB RF imaging core competence to enable standoff sensing of a
premise for enhanced situational awareness, to assist rescue operations
in hard-to-reach terrains such as collapsed buildings after an
earthquake, and to eradicate land mines to save lives.”

MADRID (AP) — King Juan Carlos's son-in-law will stop taking part in official ceremonies because of business dealings that are under investigation, Spain's Royal Palace said Monday as it sought to dissipate a whiff of scandal.

The decision regarding Inaki Urdangarin, husband of the monarch's daughter Princess Cristina, was a mutual one made by Urdangarin and the Royal Palace, its chief of staff Rafael Spottorno said in a rare meeting with Spanish media.

Urdangarin,
43, is reportedly suspected of siphoning away funds from public
contracts awarded from 2004 to 2006 to a non-profit foundation he then
headed.

The allegation looks terrible for the royal family at a time of acute hardship and economic crisis in Spain, where unemployment stands at 21.5 percent.

Urdangarin
has not been charged with a crime. He issued a statement Saturday
saying he regrets the "damage" the case is doing to the royal family but
admitted no wrongdoing.
Spottorno insisted on presumption of
innocence and urged investigators to conclude their probe soon as he
announced Urdangarin will for now be removed from the royal family's
agenda and no longer attend any official ceremonies involving it.
Spottorno said it was not yet known if the princess would also stay away from such activities.
The
couple and their four children now live in Washington, D.C., where
Urdangarin works for Spanish telecommunications company Telefonica, S.A.
No
court papers have been made public, but Spanish newspapers quote
investigators as saying Urdangarin is suspected of having taking part of
about euro6 million ($8 million) the foundation received from the
regional governments in Valencia and the Balearic Islands for organizing
events such as sports seminars.
The money is said to have gone to for-profit companies Urdangarin ran.
The
case is part of a broader, long-running corruption probe involving the
regional government in the Balearic Islands, the capital of which is
Palma on the island of Mallorca.

The
Urdangarin slice of it has been front-page news for the past two weeks,
and forced the Royal Palace to take the rare step of addressing
publicly the activities of one of its members.

Spottorno
also said that by the end of the month, the Royal Palace website will
publish a breakdown of the money earmarked for the family in the
government budget. In 2011, it was euro8.43 million.

King
Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia have three children. Crown Prince Felipe is
the youngest, Princess Cristina is the middle child and the eldest is
Princess Elena.

ADEN (Reuters) - At least 16 prisoners, including members of al Qaeda, escaped from a prison in the southern Yemeni city of Aden Monday, Yemeni officials said.

A security official in the south of the country, where
Islamist fighters have seized chunks of an entire province, said
detainees fled by digging a tunnel leading beyond the prison's walls.
Sixteen were at large, another local official said.
It was the second major jailbreak involving al Qaeda
members since June, when dozens of al Qaeda militants escaped from a
jail in another city, Mukalla.

Nearly a year of protests demanding the ouster of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, punctuated by bouts of fighting between his forces and tribesmen and military units who oppose him, have seen Islamists gain power in the south.

Deteriorating security in the area, where parts of the
Abyan province are under control of Islamist fighters, have fanned fears
in Saudi Arabia and Washington -- which long backed Saleh in its
campaign against al Qaeda -- that the Yemeni branch of the group may
gain a foothold near key oil shipping routes.
Al Qaeda members, including one convicted in a 2002
attack on the French-flagged oil tanker Limburg off Yemen, escaped from a
jail in the capital Sanaa in 2006, helping to revive the group after
Saudi security forces weakened it in that country.
Saleh's foes have accused him of deliberately letting
Islamists in the south grow stronger to reinforce his argument that his
rule alone can prevent the country sliding into chaos that would empower
al Qaeda, whose Yemeni wing has planned abortive attacks on U.S. and
other targets.
(Reporting by Mohammed Mukhashaf; Joseph Logan)

And justice for all … Metallica perform with Dave Mustaine at 30th-anniversary show. Photograph: Tim Mosenfelder/WireImage

Metallica
have wrapped up an extraordinary week of anniversary shows by reuniting
with former members. Saturday night saw the return of Dave Mustaine and
Ron McGovney, who performed with the band for the first time since
1982.
After 30 years, Metallica still know how to throw a party. For four nights, the metal
legends rocked San Francisco's Fillmore, inviting friends and
collaborators, as well as hundreds of prize-winning fans. There were
video tributes by U2 and Slipknot, jams with a New Orleans brass brand,
and the premiere of unreleased studio recordings. The band didn't just
fly in their most recent musical partner, Lou Reed – they brought in
everyone from Glenn Danzig to Apocalyptica, as well as members of Judas
Priest, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Saxon and Alice in Chains. When they played Iron
Man and Paranoid on Saturday night, it was with one half of Black Sabbath – Ozzy Osbourne and Geezer Butler.
But
the most touching team-ups were with former members. Fans were thrilled
by the Wednesday night appearance of bassist Jason Newsted, who played
with Metallica from 1986 to 2001. "[He is] someone who lived with us,
and toured with us and did stuff with us for 14 years," James Hetfield said from the stage.
On Saturday night, the biggest surprise was Mustaine, fired from
Metallica in 1983. Although the band had already reconciled with the Megadeth frontman, almost three decades had passed since he and his former bandmates played Hit the Lights.
Formed in 1981, Metallica are one of the biggest bands of all time, sellling more than 100m albums.

A Saudi woman was beheaded on Monday after being
convicted of practising sorcery, which is banned in the
ultra-conservative kingdom, the interior ministry said.

Amina bint Abdulhalim Nassar was executed in the northern province of Jawf for "practising witchcraft and sorcery," the ministry said in a statement carried by SPA state news agency.

It
is not clear how many women have been executed in the desert-kingdom,
but another woman was beheaded in October for killing her husband by
setting his house on fire.
The beheading took to 73 the number of executions in Saudi Arabia this year.
In September, Amnesty International called on the Muslim kingdom
where 140 people were on death row to establish an "immediate moratorium
on executions."
The rights group said Saudi Arabia was one of a minority of states
which voted against a UN General Assembly resolution last December
calling for a worldwide moratorium on executions.
Rape, murder, apostasy, armed robbery and drug trafficking are all
punishable by death under Saudi Arabia's strict interpretation of
Islamic sharia law.
Amnesty says Saudi Arabia executed 27 convicts in 2010, compared to 67 executions announced the year before.

Saudi Arabia executes woman convicted of 'sorcery'

AP – 20 mins ago

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) — Saudi authorities have executed a woman convicted of practicing magic and sorcery.
The Saudi Interior Ministry says in a statement the execution took place Monday, but gave no details on the woman's crime.
The London-based al-Hayat daily, however, quoted Abdullah al-Mohsen,
chief of the religious police who arrested the woman, as saying she had
tricked people into thinking she could treat illnesses, charging them
$800 per session.
The paper said a female investigator followed
up, and the woman was arrested in April, 2009, and later convicted in a
Saudi court.
It did not give the woman's name, but said she was in her 60s.
The execution brings the total to 76 this year in Saudi Arabia, according to an Associated Press count. At least three have been women.

Syrians vote in local elections, but turnout expected to be low after activists call for boycott and deaths continue.

Last Modified: 12 Dec 2011 12:03

Syrians are casting ballots in local elections, but turnout is expected to be low after activists called for a boycott of the polls.
The SANA state news agency showed pictures of people voting and reported that voters had "flocked" to the polls on Monday.
Almost 43,000 candidates are standing for 17,588 seats in the country's 1,337 administrative units.

Meanwhile, the Syrian Revolution General Commission said six people had been killed in protests on Monday.
The elections and deaths come a day after, hundreds of army defectors
in the south have fought with loyalist forces in one of the biggest
armed confrontations in the nine-month uprising.
Earlier on Sunday, troops from the 12th Armoured Brigade, based in
Isra, 40km from the border with Jordan, stormed the nearby town of Busra
al-Harir, the Reuters news agency reported.
Al Jazeera's Nisreen El-Shamayleh, reporting from near the
Jordan-Syria border, said that the clash started when "tens of tanks
mounted with machine guns opened fire in that area earlier on Sunday
morning to try to put an end to a general strike" called for by the
opposition.

The sound of explosions and heavy machine guns was heard in Busra
al-Harir and in Lujah, an area of rocky hills north of the town, where
defectors have been hiding and attacking military supply lines.
At least 26 people were killed by government troops on Sunday,
including a woman and four children, activists said. Nine of them were
killed in the city of Homs, six in Hama, three in Deraa, two in Idlib
and another two outside of Damascus.
At least five Syrian soldiers, including a military officer, were also reportedly killed.
In another development likely to raise international pressure on President Bashar al-Assad, French Foreign Minister
Alain
Juppe said on Sunday that Paris believed Syria was behind attacks that
wounded French peacekeepers in neighbouring Lebanon on Friday.
Meanwhile, the opposition across Syria launched an indefinite general
strike on Sunday as part of the first phase of a civil disobedience
campaign to pile pressure on Assad to quit.General strikes
Opposition activists said they had shut down much of the capital and other towns with a strike, the biggest walkout by
workers since the protest movement demanding Assad's removal erupted in March.
The Local Co-ordination Committees (LCC), a Syrian rights group,
organised the civil disobedience campaign, including the closure of
shops and universities in protest, as well as sit-in demonstrations
across the country.
"This strike is really a desperate action, a desperate cry from the
Syrian people, the last civilian action we could do," Ashraf al-Moqdad, a
member of the Syrian opposition calling for civil disobedience, told Al
Jazeera.
"We've been demonstrating peacefully for nine months. Thousands of us
have been murdered by Assad and his thugs. We've been waiting for real
concrete action from the international community ... What else can we
do?

"This is part of our desperate action to get the attention of the
international community to look at us. Please look at our situation. We
are desperate now."
Security forces in Syria told striking shopkeepers on Sunday to open up their stores or they would be smashed.
"We heard reports that troops burned down at least 178 stores and
shops in Deraa to try and take revenge against civillians who have shut
down their stores and shops and are basically observing this general
strike," our correspondent said.
Syria has barred most independent journalists from the country,
making it difficult to gauge the extent of participation in the strike.
A witness who toured Damascus said most shops were closed in the main
shopping street of the old Medan quarter in the centre of the capital
where there has been a heavy security presence. The main souq in Old
Damascus remained open.
Central parts of the capital and the business hub Aleppo seemed calm,
though there are reports of strikes taking hold in some areas on the
outskirts of both cities.

"There is nothing going on," said Rula, a schoolteacher in Damascus. "Nothing seems out of the ordinary."
The opposition used Facebook and online videos to call for an open-ended "Strike for Dignity" to begin on Sunday.
The LCC has termed the strike "the first step in an overall civil disobedience" campaign to overthrow the government.
Navi Pillay, the UN human rights commissioner, has said that "more
than 4,000 people" have been killed in the government crackdown on
dissent in Syria since protests broke out in March.

The WikiLeaks logo 'works as a sort of graphic manifesto', argues the author [AFP]

Melbourne, Australia - There is something eerie
about the WikiLeaks logo (see above). It works as a sort of graphic
manifesto, an image of dense political content stating a notion of ample
consequences. A cosmic sandglass encloses a duplicated globe seen from
an angle that puts Iraqi territory at the centre.
Inside this device the upper and darker planet is exchanged, drip by
drip, for a new one. The power of the image lies in the sense of
inexorability it conveys, alluding to earthly absolutes like the flow of
time and the force of gravity: a bullish threat that grants the upper
world no room for hope. The logo narrates a gradual apocalypse, and by
articulating this process of transformation through the image of the
leak, WikiLeaks defines itself as the critical agent in the destruction
of the old and the becoming of the new world.
What has become manifest since late November 2010, with the release
of what is now known as "The US Embassy Cables", is that the narrative
implicit in the WikiLeaks logo, that of a world disjunct, describes a
greater struggle against the global power held diffusely by
transnational corporations and enforced by governments around the world.
This power is under attack by a relatively new actor that can be
called, for now, the autonomous network.
The conditions that allow the network to challenge the power of
governments and corporations can be traced to the origin of the Internet
and the Cold War zeitgeist that made the network we know possible. It
was only because Cold War strategists had to narrate to themselves the
unfolding of convoluted thermonuclear apocalypse scenarios, a dark art
that peaked with Herman Kahn's surreal book On Thermonuclear War, that a computer network with the characteristics of the internet was implemented.

"I
loved this concept of the purest things in the universe being unowned.
The early Internet was so accidental, it also was free and open in this
sense. "- Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak

The idea of imminent apocalypse was so extraordinary that it allowed
for the radical thinking that over a decade evolved into the TCP/IP
computer protocol suite, a resilient network protocol that makes the end
user of the network its primary agent. The design philosophy of the
internet protocols represents a clean break from the epistemes and
continuums that had historically informed the evolution of Western
power, as traced by Foucault and Deleuze from sovereign societies to
disciplinary societies to societies of control.
Steve Wozniak has written,
"I was also taught that space, and the moon, were free and open. Nobody
owned them. No country owned them. I loved this concept of the purest
things in the universe being unowned. The early internet was so
accidental, it also was free and open in this sense".
To produce a commons is indeed an accident for Empire.
Dismissed as a never-meant-for-the-masses autonomous zone, by and for
the military and academia, it was allowed to evolve out of control. But
this accident that happened because of daydreaming an extreme future
never stopped happening.
It evolved.
At some point it gained an accessible graphic interface, and spilled
all over the globe. By then it was too late to disarm what is now the
increasingly contentious coexistence of two worlds, as the WikiLeaks
logo registers. One world is a pre-apocalyptic capitalistic society of
individualism, profit and control; the other a post-apocalyptic
community of self-regulating collaborative survivors. The conflict
arises from an essential paradox: Because the web exists, both worlds
need it in order to prevail over the other.
The "cyber war" announced so spectacularly (in the Debordian sense)
in the days following WikiLeaks' US Embassy Cables release is not really
about the DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service), "denial of service"
attacks that barely obstructed access to the MasterCard website for a
few hours. If anything, the ephemerality of the disturbance leaves the
sensation that Anonymous, the group that launched it, is far from being a
structural threat. What journalists around the world have failed to
narrate is the tale of a network that increasingly challenges, bypasses
and outcompetes the global corporate-government complex.This
is a struggle about the obsolescence of the very idea of the
nation-state, and an almost unanimous coalition of governments, led by
the US, fighting furiously to regain control by exerting legal,
financial, symbolic and, perhaps most concerning, technical violence on
their adversary.Rogue episteme
Approaching the history of the internet through the Cold War
zeitgeist helps us see a sort of Schumpeterian quality in the network.
It is essentially a destructive entity that, like the Terminator, comes
from the future (the imagined end of civilisation) and is set loose in
an arcane environment (the present) that fights back. Perhaps the fact
that Anonymous defines itself using a tone and vocabulary that closely
resemble the description of the Terminator in James Cameron's 1983 film
is not a coincidence but a sign of the epistemic brotherhood of two
post-apocalyptic entities.The Terminator:

Listen. Understand. That
Terminator is out there. It can't be reasoned with, it can't be
bargained with… it doesn't feel pity of remorse or fear… and it
absolutely will not stop. Ever. Until you are dead. (James Cameron,
director, The Terminator)

Anonymous:

Your feelings mean nothing to
us. … We have no culture, we have no laws, written or otherwise. … We do
not sleep, we do not eat and we do not feel remorse. We will tear you
apart from outside and in, we have all the time in the world. (extract
from entry on Anonymous in the Encyclopedia Dramatica)

Network-native structures and their resulting communities are fuelled
by hybrid motivations often alien to the material struggles seen by
Marxism to lie behind the motion of history. In his book Hacking Capitalism, Johan
Söderberg proposes the notion of "play struggle" as opposed to "class
struggle" as the force that drives hackers as well as diverse realms of
the network society.

Similar to labour in that it is a
productive engagement with the world, play differs in that it is freely
chosen and marked by a high degree of self-determination among the
players. At its heart, the politics of play struggle consist in the distance it places between doing and the wage relation. Play is a showcase of how labour self-organises its constituent power outside the confines of market exchanges.

Söderberg proposes that play is labour within an exchange system
external to the autocratic determinations of materialism. With the
notion of "play struggle", we can understand Anonymous and its instant
response in the wake of the WikiLeaks attack.
Anonymous emerged spontaneously from 4Chan.org, which has a curious
set of features: (a) anonymity, (b) "lack of memory" (as opposed to
"cloud computing", no record is kept in its servers but rather in the
collective memory sedimented in the minds and hard drives of its users),
(c) emphasis on visual conversation (through the intervention of
images), and (d) a non-censorship policy that is only afraid of the
police (as opposed to the market). Therefore, Play: These
characteristics are all instrumental to placing in 4Chan an
insurmountable distance "between doing and the wage relation".
Its unique policy, its origin, ownership and ethos, and its substantial
and highly engaged playful community make 4Chan the internet's most
prolific semiotic laboratory.
It is telling that the software used to perform the denial of service
attacks on MasterCard, PayPal and Amazon is a relatively simple
programme called LOIC, for Low Orbit Ion Cannon, a fictional weapon in
the Command & Conquer series of video games.Play
drives Anonymous. It is the glue that ultimately holds it together, and
the threat of state/corporate control triggers its reaction. Serious
play is at the core of the rogue episteme. When play follows only its
own logic it necessarily escapes commodification.
To play seriously is often counterplay, to
set the system itself as the locus of play (even 4Chan has been a
victim, because it is funny, of its own DDoS attacks). Instead of
commodification by the mainstream, it is 4Chan that exploits the
mainstream deconstructing its text, inverting and problematising its
original intentions in a way that exceeds fan culture. 4Chan.org is a
primary node in the fundamental clash of the centre and the indigestible
fringe of contemporary digital culture.
For an average individual, visiting 4Chan, and particularly its main
forum called simply '/b/', can be either repulsive or disappointing. Its
content is distasteful to sensibilities constructed by the twentieth
century's mammoths of consumption-driven mass media, and their resulting
version of reality. Its autonomous project requires a stage of
disorientation because its method is continuously to produce and evolve a
language of its own. After all, how can autonomy be claimed while using
the language of the oppressors? How can a new epistemological commons
come to be if not by the crafting of an alternative language? Perhaps
4Chan is not exactly what Sean Cubitt had in mind when interrogating
digital aesthetics, but it is certainly a model that seems to hold its
ground against the "insidious blandness" of the corporate site:

Digital aesthetics needs both to
come up with something far more interesting than corporate sites, and
to act critically to point up their insidious blandness and global
ambitions. Subversion of the dominant is inadequate. In its place, it is
essential to imagine a work without coherence, without completion and
without autonomy. Such a work, however, must also be able to take on the
scale of the cyborg culture, a scale beyond the individual, and outside
the realm of the hyper-individuated subject. By the same token,
aesthetics must move beyond the organic unity of the art object and
embrace the social process of making.

Anonymous and 4Chan currently play a strategic and necessary role in
the struggle: the construction of an alternative episteme based on the
commons of play rather than on consumption and commodities. Yet their
political impact, in the case of the WikiLeaks embargo, was blown out of
proportion. Mainstream journalism focused on the ultimately symbolic
skirmishes starred by Anonymous, hyping the spectacular narrative of a
cyberwar fought by an otherised and widely misunderstood cultural
movement that cannot be called "hacktivist". As Richard Stallman has explained, a DDoS attack is not really hacking, but the digital version of mass protest.

If code is law, then protocol is the constitution.

Coup de net
"There is no remote corner of the internet not dependent on protocols."The point Laura DeNardis wants to get across in her book Protocol Politics: The Globalization of Internet Governance
is that network protocols are a matter of huge political value, value
that only grows as the net spreads. Lessig inaugurated this line of
thinking when he famously stated "code is law".
But protocol runs deeper than software: If code is law, then protocol
is the constitution. This is why, as long as attention is diverted
towards the spectacular (like tactical and superficial DDoS attacks),
governments can start the demolition of the protocols that grant the
possibility of autonomy to the network. In reaction to the release of
the US Embassy Cables, the UN called for the creation of a group that
would end the current multi-stakeholder nature of the Internet
Governance Forum (IGF) to give the last word on internet control to the
governments of the world. The almost illegible resolution calls for the
UN:

"to convene open and inclusive
consultations involving all Member States and all other stakeholders
with a view to assisting the process towards enhanced cooperation in order to enable Governments on an equal footing to carry out their roles and responsibilities in respect of international public policy issues pertaining to the Internet but not of the day-to-day technical and operational matters that do not impact upon those issues."

I have emphasised the fragments where the meaning hides: to "enable Governments to carry out their roles and responsibilities in respect of international public policy issues pertaining to the internet"
is of course a nice way to talk about enabling the surveillance,
censorship and control that the current protocols still make porous. The
closing "concession" gives away the true intentions, "but not of the day-to-day technical and operational matters that do not impact upon those issues" meansthat once control is reinstated, people shall go on thinking they are free.
After Hillary Clinton stated that the leaks are "an attack on the
international community", the move to gain control of the IGF is
unsurprising. It fits the conflict outlined by the WikiLeaks logo. Even
if the motion is defeated, which is currently possible, a card has been
shown. More moves of this nature, on all possible fronts, will follow
until the coup de net is complete. The IGF episode matches Douglas Rushkoff's analysis of the ongoing "net neutrality" debate:

"The moment the 'net neutrality'
debate began was the moment the net neutrality debate was lost. … [the
internet] will never truly level the playing fields of commerce,
politics, and culture. And if it looks like that does stand a chance of
happening, the internet will be adjusted to prevent it."

Protocols are the defining battlefield in the struggle between
governments and corporations and the autonomous network. The UN’s
attempt to take over the IGF is a true act of cyber war with the
strategic warfare plan of hacking the internet to finally eradicate its
aspirations for autonomy.
In an ambivalent world that is simultaneously exploring new
territories of freedom and being subjected to heightened measures of
control, the gradual reclamation of the commons is the crucial
operation. The internet fosters processes of decommodification that
effectively challenge capitalism. Rather than being the result of a
violent class struggle, the end of capitalist hegemony might be the
result of a slow internet-enabled process of migration, a dripping (to
abuse once more the WikiLeaks logo) towards societies that organise
around commons.
What is interesting is that WikiLeaks, after all, is still up and
running. Someone still hosts it (poetically, a hosting company located
in a Cold War-era anti-nuclear bunker), and their fund-raising channels
have diversify to bypass the embargo (with partial success). WikiLeaks
is an example of how a rogue can still thrive against the will of
Empire, supported by an emerging ecology of more autonomous actors.
MasterCard, PayPal and Amazon don't need to be shut, just bypassed or
outcompeted. As the autonomous ecology matures, it allows for more
complexity. This is where the war stands to be won: in the building of
autonomous structures of all sorts (structures that bypass and
outcompete existing ones) on top of other new structures until the
entire old world is unnecessary.Nicolás Mendoza is a scholar, artist and researcher in global media from The University of Melbourne and a member of the P2P Foundation. His recent work can be found here.Follow him on Twitter: @nicolasmendoA version of this article was previously published in the Journal of Radical Philosophy.The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.